The
confounding concept of time represented by the four thousand-year-old
trees isn't doubled or tripled by the geology of this place, but multiplied
by the thousands.
500
million years ago, this mountain was the ancient coastline of California,
a coastline from a time when Dinosaurs roamed to the east, and the unimaginable
ancestors of modern sharks preyed the low waters below. By the accidents
of geologic history, this land has remained relatively unchanged.
Today,
its peaks are rounded, its ridges dulled and its forms subdued. It is
altogether an unspectacular sight from afar. As we near the end of the
'American Century', a vast network of changes are before us, a transformation.
To comprehend the speed of the change, it is humbling to stand here in
a range of infinite oldness and history. It is perspective beyond compare.
Looking
down into the Owens Valley, I see the layout of a very familiar story
to the people of Central California. Dry lakes, empty dustbowls. Once
this land was green and filled with lakes. Big lakes, small lakes and
in between lakes. It is an ecosystem that has been devastated in a matter of
a century, all for the sake of Los Angeles, a desert city which made a
desert out of Central California in order to build a mirage for itself;
that it is, in fact, not a desert city. It began with a sip, a drink of
Central California, and then in no time the lakes below went empty.
Everything
below me now looks as miserable as the scrub brush of Los Angeles. For
all it is worth, this is a transformation that has just begun. To people
who have lived for centuries in the desert, the Berbers, the Mongolians
the desert is clean and graceful, to be respected for its life-bringing.
In new desert cultures, there is no sense of respect, from the wasteland
we call Texas to the coastal chaparral of Los Angeles, people moved here
out of want and ambition, not for climate or landscape. Los Angeles has
always been an ugly place. Long before smog, Los Angeles still yielded
no true blue sky. The mix of inland dust settling in the valleys, the
dying brown of the hills, the sick Grey of the sky, and the sun shining
through. All of these from natural origin.
No
doubt then, that people who moved here were those who had no concept of
nature; it was separate, to be conquered and avoided. The children, too,
of Southland settlers are prone to this idea of Earth. Born unto a land
of endless highway and street-corners and city blocks, the young Angeleno
is suppressed by squares and rectangles. He is, like no generation before
him, a product of a world completely ignorant of open spaces. He is brought
into a world that urges him to be sedentary, for whom nothing is habitual
than to switch on a television and live vicariously through the lives
of the sports figures he once craved to be. For him, the city blocks are
his entire future, so how can he have perspective?
